In Search of the Greatest Living Artist

February 14, 2020

“Anselm Kiefer has always been such a name for me — more so than any other artist of our time, perhaps — because his works are so monumental, so charged with time, so burdened by history, and because the private sphere, the near and the personal, is so completely absent from them.”

Since his teens, the novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard has been fascinated by the German painter Anselm Kiefer, one of the biggest names in contemporary art.

For this week’s cover story, Knausgaard followed Kiefer back to the place of his origin.

OUR COVER STORY

Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum, for The New York Times

Into the Black Forest With the Greatest Living Artist

How does Anselm Kiefer conjure such brutal beauty, such overwhelming gravity? To find out, the novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard followed him back to the source.

By Karl Ove Knausgaard

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AN UPDATE TO THE 1619 PROJECT

Dannielle Bowman for The New York Times

The 1619 Project

They Sold Human Beings Here

For hundreds of years, enslaved people were bought and sold in America. Today most of the sites of this trade are forgotten. As part of The 1619 Project, we photographed 12 of them.

By Anne C. Bailey

Between approximately 1760 and 1860, nearly 1.2 million enslaved men, women and children were sold in the United States. Today most of the sites of this trade are forgotten. The historian Anne C. Bailey combed through archives to expand the historical record of America’s slave-auction sites, and we sent Dannielle Bowman to photograph 12 of them.